Top 250 Larry McMurtry Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Nothing good ever comes without a price.”

— Larry McMurtry

2. “If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.”

— Larry McMurtry

3. “If a warrior lacked wisdom, courage alone would not keep him alive for long.”

— Larry McMurtry

4. “A woman’s love is like the morning dew. It’s just as likely to settle on a horse turd as a rose.”

— Larry McMurtry

5. “The whole point of loyalty was not to change: stick with those who stuck with you.”

— Larry McMurtry

6. “If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk – and feisty gentlemen.”

— Larry McMurtry

7. “Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.”

— Larry McMurtry

8. “Yesterday’s gone on down the river and you can’t get it back.”

— Larry McMurtry

9. “The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”

— Larry McMurtry

10. “Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.”

— Larry McMurtry

11. “You know Deets is like me – he’s not one to quit on a garment just because it’s got a little age – spoken by Augustus McCrae.”

— Larry McMurtry

12. “You know more than you say and I say more than I know. That means we’re a perfect match, as long as we don’t hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.”

— Larry McMurtry

13. “The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”

— Larry McMurtry

14. “And yet death was not something you could ignore. It had its weight. It was a dead man lying upstairs, not a man who was sick. It seemed to her she had better not form the practice of ignoring death. If she tried it, death would find a way to answer back – it would take another of her loved ones, to remind her to respect it.”

— Larry McMurtry

15. “Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.”

— Larry McMurtry

16. “The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.”

— Larry McMurtry

17. “Americans don’t want cowboys to be gay.”

— Larry McMurtry

18. “It’s funny, leaving a place, ain’t it?” he said. “You never do know when you’ll get back.”

— Larry McMurtry

19. “There isn’t a thought in my head I care to be alone with for more than five minutes.”

— Larry McMurtry

20. “It was something he had always done – moved apart, so he could be alone and think things or a little.”

— Larry McMurtry

21. “But, as with people, some plants were completely useless.”

— Larry McMurtry

22. “Most of the talk of human beings was silly talk, talk that was of less weight than a man’s breath.”

— Larry McMurtry

23. “If you did a thing hoping a person wouldn’t find out, that person always did.”

— Larry McMurtry

24. “A man who wouldn’t cheat for a poke don’t want one bad enough. – Augustus “Gus” McCrae.”

— Larry McMurtry

25. “It’s a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.”

— Larry McMurtry

26. “The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.”

— Larry McMurtry

27. “I think we spent our best years fighting on the wrong side.”

— Larry McMurtry

28. “You have to remember that I’ve been lonely for a long time. Loneliness is like ice. After you’ve been lonely long enough you don’t realize you’re cold, but you are... I don’t know, maybe at the center of me there’s some ice that never will melt, maybe it’s just been there too long. But you mustn’t worry. You didn’t put it there.”

— Larry McMurtry

29. “Uva uvum vivendo varia fit.”

— Larry McMurtry

30. “Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams.”

— Larry McMurtry

31. “If I had a mind to rent pigs, I’d be mighty upset. A man that likes to rent pigs won’t be stopped.”

— Larry McMurtry

32. “Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at.”

— Larry McMurtry

33. “People would be bored shitless if they had to love only the good in someone they care about.”

— Larry McMurtry

34. “All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream. – T. K. Whipple, Study Out the Land.”

— Larry McMurtry

35. “In times of crisis human beings don’t have it in them to be rational.”

— Larry McMurtry

36. “I suppose you set up reading the Good Book all night-spoken by Woodrow Call.”

— Larry McMurtry

37. “Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.”

— Larry McMurtry

38. “Anyway, whacking a surly bartender ain’t much of a crime.”

— Larry McMurtry

39. “From him to the stars, in all directions, there was only silence and emptiness.”

— Larry McMurtry

40. “My main skills are talking and cooking biscuits,′ Augustus said. ‘And getting drunk on the porch.”

— Larry McMurtry

41. “It’s just that it’s fearsome for a man to have a woman start thinking right in front of him. It always leads to trouble.”

— Larry McMurtry

42. “I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.”

— Larry McMurtry

43. “Live through it,” Call said. “That’s all we can do.”

— Larry McMurtry

44. “No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won’t start.”

— Larry McMurtry

45. “It’s really quite simple. Mr. Isinglass robbed my father, destroyed my mother, exiled my brothers, and ruined me. If I catch him asleep I’ll kill him. I do hope you like this pudding. I had to ride quite a way to find the plums.”

— Larry McMurtry

46. “Occasionally the very youngness of the young moved him to charity – they had no sense of the swiftness of life, nor of its limits. The years would pass like weeks, and loves would pass too, or else grow sour.”

— Larry McMurtry

47. “The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the little backyard was filled with the little rainbows as the sun touched the dew.”

— Larry McMurtry

48. “You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.”

— Larry McMurtry

49. “Don’t be trying to give back pain for pain... You can’t get even measures in business like this.”

— Larry McMurtry

50. “Why would you want to keep in practice being wrong?” Call asked. “I’d think it would be something you’d try to avoid.” “You can’t avoid it, you’ve got to learn to handle it,” Augustus said. “If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it’s bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day – that way they ain’t usually much worse than a dry shave.”

— Larry McMurtry